Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris will likely be elected president and vice president of the United States. A Biden administration's approach to Africa will depend on policy but also on who the president appoints to his cabinet and senior positions.

The ongoing Emirship tussle in Nigeria begs broader questions about the place of traditional rulership in Africa’s emerging democracies.

Rich people are everywhere, and they can have something to say about the level of economic development in their home countries. Afrasia Bank and New World Wealth have just published the 2019 Africa Wealth Report, which includes North Africa and African island states in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It identifies the continent’s six wealthiest cities, defined as total individual private wealth—equities, real estate, businesses—less liabilities. They are Johannesburg, Cape Town, Cairo, Lagos, Durban, and Nairobi.

On December 3, John Nkengasong, director, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), announced a 60 percent vaccination target—one estimate of the level needed to achieve herd immunity from COVID-19—in Africa’s fifty-four countries.

The birth of Archie, the first son of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has led to British media speculation, picked-up by the New York Times, that the Queen (actually, in conjunction with the Theresa May government) may dispatch them to Africa for a undetermined period. Their role, beyond lubricating the UK’s ties with its former African colonies, would be to build support for the Commonwealth of Nations. It would also get the Royal couple out of the media circus surrounding Archie’s birth. There is further speculation that Archie’s mixed race would make the family particularly attractive to Africans.

Rather than a discussion about policy and ideas, the September 29 debate between Trump and Biden was a rant. In Africa, the debate will hardly burnish the image of democracy or the United States.